​Magic's in the Makeup

​I was in Target the other day in the beauty aisle, as I’m wont to do, browsing for either face powder or a makeup brush, when I overheard a small child’s voice warbling, “Girly girl, girly girl, if you’re not careful, you’re gonna turn into a girly girl!” He was maybe 4 years old, young enough to be strapped into the child’s seat of a shopping cart. His sister, the aim of his teasing, was old enough to be holding a third child on her hip, and mature enough to ignore her brother. It wasn’t quite clear what she’d said or done to earn his provocation, if anything at all.

​​My first instinct was to dropkick this offending child who, at his young age, has already internalized and believes that calling his sister a "girly girl" is an insult. There are enough people in the world who hate young girls, and trust me when I say it’s not just boys and men. I’ve overheard female coworkers deride their prepubescent sons’ respective crushes, even going so far as to call the 11-year old girls “hussies.” Joking or not, it sets a precedent to view girls a certain way even before we know what it really means.

This seems at odds with my experiences that, with very few exceptions, the nicest people I meet are young girls and other women. They’re the ones from whom I am most often complimented on my skincare and makeup. When I went to see the movie “Maleficent,” a girl who appeared to be around 6 or 7 was dressed as Aurora, a literal embodiment of a little princess in a pink, poofy dress. I noticed her peering up at me while we were standing in the ticket line, and she tugged her mother’s hand while hiding behind her legs. She whispered something up to her, still peeking out at me.

I began to feel embarrassed, because I assumed the girl had gotten a good look at my t-shirt, which featured a scantily clad nun with a demon’s tongue snaking into her ear, the word “lust” emblazoned across my chest. Her mother turned to me and I was bracing myself, expecting a comment on the inappropriate and blasphemous nature of my shirt. Instead, what she said was, with a half-exasperated, half-amused sigh, “I’m sorry, but my daughter just wanted to tell you that she thinks you’re pretty.”

I spent a lot of time before and during puberty hiding myself in oversize t-shirts and refusing to wear a bra, even silly training bras, largely because it felt too intimidating, and not to mention just damn uncomfortable. I couldn’t breathe with the bland, beige Victoria’s Secret bralette squeezed across my barely-there chest. I remember watching "Clueless" and, observing the outfits worn by Cher and Dionne, wondering how I’d ever get through high school if I had to dress like that. That feeling was intensified when Tai, whose tomboy style I more closely mimicked at the time, was made over in a similar fashion to the two leads. Knee-high stockings and plaid skirts? Bare midriffs? Hair dye? Makeup?! It was too much for my awkward, prepubescent little heart to handle.

Eventually, and I’m not absolutely positive when my ugly duckling phase ended, but ended it did, and not with a whimper, but with a bang. But it’s not like women are given much of a choice in the matter. However, rather than subscribing to the preppy styles of a 1990s-era Beverly Hills as I feared, I take my fashion cues from Fiona Goode of “American Horror Story: Coven,” and my makeup inspiration is culled from Dita von Teese. Rather than continuing to shy away from my features, hiding them in baggy cargo pants and brushed-out, frizzy curls, I now spend as much time as possible trying to become the elegant yet decidedly Goth-lite queen I decided I so desperately wanted to be when I emerged from the clutches of puberty.

If I’m going to have the pale skin and dark hair, I may as well exaggerate these features to my advantage. I dye my already dark brown hair to what my stylist calls simply “blue black.” Through necessity, I mix a pure white foundation with the lightest shades I can find to achieve a tone that matches my face.

I think about my trepidation at what I thought high school, and the rest of life as a female, was going to be like: predetermined, all miniskirts and headbands. Now through my own ritual of applying makeup and draping myself in black and red and oxblood, I’ll gladly embrace my own interpretation of being a girly girl. There are certainly worse things to be.